Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting

Alessandro Chesser is a 40-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He’s married with two kids and was the first in his family to attend college. His grandfather immigrated from Sicily and worked as a school janitor so his family could have a better life. Skip forward a few generations, and Chesser is noticing the way wealthy investors hide their money to avoid paying taxes. He’s outraged and wants to upend the tax system, which he thinks is unfair to the everyday American worker.

Here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we excel at finding things: government documents, paper trails, the misdeeds people have tried to hide. It’s serious work. But that gave us an idea: What would happen if we used these skills for things that are less about accountability and more about joy? If we turned our energy toward personally meaningful questions? That was the spark for our first-ever Inconsequential Investigations hour.

Few political figures occupy the sort of space in American history that Al Gore does. A longtime Tennessee congressman before becoming vice president, Gore lost the presidency in 2000 to George W. Bush after a highly controversial decision by the Supreme Court. But in the years that followed, Gore didn’t slink into history. Instead, he worked to sound the growing alarm on climate change, most notably with his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which came out 20 years ago.

Last year, arts organizations and cultural institutions across the US received an alarming message: Their federal grants had been canceled. The letters said their projects no longer aligned with new federal priorities and that money was being redirected toward the Trump administration’s agenda. The grants had funded museum exhibits, public art programs, historical research, and community arts initiatives.

As news broke that Iran’s supreme leader had been killed, prominent critic Arash Azizi found himself trying to make sense of a moment he had long imagined. For years, Azizi studied Iran’s political system and hoped for change from within. Now, with the man who defined that system gone, Azizi was left with questions: What comes next for Iran? And who gets to decide? This week on Reveal, reporters Najib Aminy, Kiera Butler, and Nadia Hamdan follow the ripple effects of the war in Iran.

Two veteran journalists set out to document Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health care system: hospitals attacked, medical workers killed, doctors detained and held for long periods without criminal charges. The BBC had commissioned the film. But their Palestinian sources in Gaza and the West Bank were skeptical. “We really had to try and persuade them…to talk to us because they didn’t—and don’t—trust the BBC,” says reporter Ramita Navai. One source doubted the BBC would air the film.

The nation’s most prestigious magazine awards announced that Mother Jones is a finalist in two categories—for general excellence and profile writing—and one of the top podcasting awards recognized Reveal as the best news & politics podcast.

The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well.

One of the unmistakable throughlines of the second Trump administration is how it’s overhauling policies that directly affect African Americans, most notably by targeting programs and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. For journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, it’s an attempt to take the country back to an era before the civil rights movement.

Back in February 2010, the radio show State of the Re:Union, created by Al Letson, produced an award-winning episode looking at civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. The episode was called “Who Is This Man?” because while Rustin was not well known, his work supported the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. Rustin was a man with a number of seemingly incompatible labels: Black, gay, Quaker—identifications that served to earn him as many detractors as admirers.